Had We Merely Desired To Please The Imagination Of Our
Readers, It Would Have Been Easy To Have Painted The
Country and the
people rather as we could have wished them to be, than as they
actually were, at the
Period to which our description refers; and,
probably, what is thus lost in truthfulness, it would have gained
in popularity with that class of readers who peruse books more for
amusement than instruction.
When I say that Canada is destined to be one of the most prosperous
countries in the world, let it not be supposed that I am influenced
by any unreasonable partiality for the land of my adoption. Canada
may not possess mines of gold or silver, but she possesses all those
advantages of climate, geological structure, and position, which are
essential to greatness and prosperity. Her long and severe winter,
so disheartening to her first settlers, lays up, amidst the forests
of the West, inexhaustible supplies of fertilising moisture for the
summer, while it affords the farmer the very best of natural roads
to enable him to carry his wheat and other produce to market. It is
a remarkable fact, that hardly a lot of land containing two hundred
acres, in British America, can be found without an abundant supply
of water at all seasons of the year; and a very small proportion
of the land itself is naturally unfit for cultivation. To crown
the whole, where can a country be pointed out which possesses such
an extent of internal navigation? A chain of river navigation and
navigable inland seas, which, with the canals recently constructed,
gives to the countries bordering on them all the advantages of an
extended sea-coast, with a greatly diminished risk of loss from
shipwreck!
Little did the modern discoverers of America dream, when they called
this country "Canada," from the exclamation of one of the exploring
party, "Aca nada," - "there is nothing here," as the story goes, that
Canada would far outstrip those lands of gold and silver, in which
their imaginations revelled, in that real wealth of which gold
and silver are but the portable representatives. The interminable
forests - that most gloomy and forbidding feature in its scenery to
the European stranger, should have been regarded as the most certain
proof of its fertility.
The severity of the climate, and the incessant toil of clearing the
land to enable the first settlers to procure the mere necessaries of
life, have formed in its present inhabitants an indomitable energy
of character, which, whatever may be their faults, must be regarded
as a distinguishing attribute of the Canadians, in common with our
neighbours of the United States. When we consider the progress of
the Northern races of mankind, it cannot be denied, that while the
struggles of the hardy races of the North with their severe climate,
and their forests, have gradually endowed them with an unconquerable
energy of character, which has enabled them to become the masters of
the world; the inhabitants of more favoured climates, where the
earth almost spontaneously yields all the necessaries of life, have
remained comparatively feeble and inactive, or have sunk into sloth
and luxury.
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